With an aging population that is living longer—an estimated 10,000 baby boomers become eligible for Medicare each day — and a shortage of specialists trained for the field, palliative care is no longer taking a back seat to more traditional healthcare. The majority of respondents to the Healthcare Intelligence Network’s first annual Palliative Care survey in February 2014 said they have a palliative care program in place, and of those that don’t, more than half said they planned to launch a program within 12 months.
Here are nine benchmarks gleaned from the 2014 Palliative Care survey:
- Timely referrals of patients to palliative care are one of the biggest challenges to implementing a program, according to 89 percent of respondents.
- Frailty is a key characteristic of their palliative patient/member population, say 48 percent of respondents; other traits include impaired cognitive capacity (34 percent) and disabilities (15 percent).
- Candidates for palliative care are primarily identified by physician referrals (78 percent).
- More than half (60 percent) of respondents said that case management assessments were important tools for identifying palliative care candidates.
- While the majority of respondents (68 percent) administer palliative care on an inpatient basis, more than half (54 percent) say care is conducted on home visits and just under a third offer palliative care at extended care facilities.
- About 88 percent of respondents with palliative care programs reported an increase in patient satisfaction levels among Medicare participants, while 89 percent saw more satisfaction among caregivers.
- Overall, the presence of palliative care helped to curb healthcare utilization costs for 70 percent of respondents.
- Seventy-one percent of respondents with palliative care programs in place reported an uptick in hospice election by Medicare patients.
- Nearly 20 percent of respondents said it was too early to tell what ROI their palliative care program generated.
Excerpted from 2014 Healthcare Benchmarks: Palliative Care
Tags: Case Management, Hospice, Palliative Care, primary care physicians
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